Category Archives: Fun

Cheating

As a teacher, I sometimes have to deal with cheating at exams in school, so I’m always interested in hearing about new cool methods of cheating that were not around back when I went to school/university.

Ask MetaFilter: How do those scummy cheats do it? “I would like to know what people actually do to cheat in university (or school, or academic settings generally). […] Surely there are some ingenious methods out there for increasing your grades?”

Recreational Mathematics

I like like the section title recreational mathematics from MathWorld, it sounds almost like recreational drugs, as if some people get high by doing mathematics. Which I guess some people do…

Ahem, back to the link that I meant to post: animated GIFs is a collection of interactive entries in this section. It includes some well-known things like the cardioid, the cycloid, the epicycloid, and the Möbius strip, as well as my favourite geometry, the Poincaré hyperbolic disk, and also some lesser-known ones like the Steiner chain, or Langton’s ant, or the coin paradox (which I incidentally used at school this very morning).

Link via Ralf by e-mail.

Tagged – four things

Four jobs I’ve had:

  1. Tutor for mathematics, English, Latin, and physics.
  2. Typist at the Federal President’s office, transferring the information on persons who were decorated by the Federal President (is there a shorter way to say this in English?) from paper to computer.
  3. Secretary at the newspaper of the German Armed Forces Union.
  4. Teacher.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

  1. Blues Brothers.
  2. The Straight Story.
  3. The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and some others by the Coen brothers.
  4. Wallace and Gromit.

Four places I’ve lived:

  1. Hetzwege, Lower Saxony.
  2. Hannover, Capitol of Lower Saxony.
  3. Bonn, North-Rhine Westphalia, former Capital of Germany.
  4. Andernach, Rhineland-Palatinate.

Four TV shows I love:

  1. Friends.

I’ll have to pass on the other ones since we don’t own a TV. My sister got me hooked on Friends by lending me the DVDs, though.

Four places I’ve vacationed:

  1. Florence and Tuscany, Italy.
  2. Kenya and Tanzania, East Africa.
  3. Devon, Cornwall and Kent, England (two different trips)
  4. Western United States (CA, NV, AZ, UT, NM, CO, WY)

Four of my favorite dishes:

  1. Tandoori Chicken with aromatic yellow rice and spicy green beans.
  2. Murg Jalfraizee (chicken with bell peppers).
  3. Curry soup, a favourite at the moment.
  4. Tiramisu, homemade by André.

Four sites I visit daily:

  1. Too many weblogs, but i usually read their feeds.
  2. National Geographic photo of the day.
  3. Astronomy picture of the day.
  4. Weather forecast for Andernach.

Four places I would rather be right now:

  1. New Zealand.
  2. Southwest of the USA, somewhere in the desert.
  3. Outside in the snow and sun, instead of at my desk.
  4. Glen Canyon, before the dam was built.

Four bloggers to tag with this:

  1. Daniel.
  2. Ralf.
  3. Hmm, almost everyone else has already been tagged…
  4. … you!

A Christmas Carol

“The Penguin Podcast is a fortnightly episode of book extracts, author interviews and features from Penguin Books UK.”

While I haven’t checked any of their excerpts out, I downloaded their Christmas special: the complete A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It’s offered in five installments. Download the mp3 files here: episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, episode 5. Maybe we’re going to listen to them while driving to our parents/in-laws for Christmas.